AUTO RACING : Kyle Petty Recalls Martinsville Memories

Kyle Petty was in a story-telling mood last weekend at Martinsville Speedway, a historic oval on which his father won a record 15 NASCAR stock car races and was making his final appearance as a driver.

After winning the pole for last Sunday’s Goody’s 500, the younger Petty talked about how special the track had been to his family, ever since grandfather Lee Petty won a race there in 1959.

“I guess the earliest I remember going to races with Daddy and the family was here at Martinsville,” Kyle said. “Back in those days, we’d get together with the kids of other drivers--mainly Dave Pearson’s boys and Bobby Allison’s sons and daughters--and play in the infield.

“After the races were over, while our fathers were signing autographs and doing the other things they had to do, we had a game.

“There was an old manual scoreboard back then. Two men posted the numbers of the top five runners by hand. Me and my sisters would rush to that scoreboard when the races were over and put daddy’s number 43 in all five spots.

“Then, the Pearson boys would come over and cover the scoreboard with David’s number, 17, which he was running back then for the old Holman-Moody team. Then, here would come the Allison bunch, that Alabama gang, and they’d take the 17s down and replace ‘em with 12s, Bobby’s number at the time.

“So much rubber gathered on the track back then that we would make balls out of it to throw at each other to try and keep the rival bunch away from the scoreboard. We were just kids,” Petty added, “9 or 10 years old, and it was good fun.

“When my family left Martinsville, which almost always was around dark, 43 usually was up there. That’s ‘cause daddy always stayed ‘til the last fan that wanted one had gotten an autograph. We were the last people to leave the track.”

Speaking of the younger Petty, he recently had an unusual experience with an autograph hunter at Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Kyle said a man walked up and asked him to sign the calf of the man’s leg, which Petty did with a felt-tip pen.

Hours later, the man returned and showed Petty that on the spot where he had signed his name was a tattoo of the autograph.

Today’s Tyson Holly Farms 400 will be the last of eight short track races this season on the 29-race NASCAR Winston Cup schedule.

There have been seven different winners in the first seven events at the tracks shorter than one mile.

Bill Elliott and Rusty Wallace were the winners at Richmond, Alan Kulwicki and Darrell Waltrip at Bristol, Davey Allison won the first race at North Wilkesboro and Mark Martin and Geoff Bodine won at Martinsville.

That’s really spreading the wealth around, especially compared with 1987 when Dale Earnhardt won six of the eight short track events.

If there were a NASCAR short track championship, which would certainly mirror the roots of the stock car sport, Kulwicki would be the leader this season by 60 points over Waltrip, with Rudd 19 points behind him.

There have been only 12 different winners in 24 Winston Cup races this season, led by Bill Elliott and Davey Allison with four apiece.

The list includes no first-time winners and is two short of last year’s total.

Drivers who won in 1991 but have failed to reach Victory Circle with just five events remaining in 1992 include Ken Schrader and Dale Jarrett. Three others--Rusty Wallace, Ricky Rudd and Geoff Bodine--each won their first races of the season in the past four weeks.

Formula One champion Nigel Mansell is expected be competitive right away in Indy-car racing next season when he takes over the seat previously occupied by Michael Andretti, who heads to Formula One.

But Mansell, who finally won his first world title this year by winning a record nine of the first 14 events, never has driven on an oval--the type of track that makes up about one-third of the Indy-car schedule.

Steve Miller, chief development engineer for Cosworth Engineering, which helped developed the new Ford Cosworth XB engines for Indy cars, said, “One road circuits, Nigel is going to be tough to beat right off. Street circuits, too. I really think he’ll be fast right away on ovals, too.

“But, whether or not he picks up the racecraft of the ovals right away is another story,” Miller added. “It may take a bit of time; it may not. But he’ll get it, and he’ll be fast everywhere.”

The announcement out of Flint, Mich., earlier this week that Buick will end its engine and chassis development program at the Indianapolis 500 and will concentrate on the Firestone Indy Lights series came as no surprise to insiders.

The General Motors division has been producing V6 engines for both, with a 425-horsepower non-turbocharged power plant used in the Lights and a 725-horsepower turbocharged engine in Indy cars.

Roberto Guerrero set one- and four-lap qualifying records in winning the pole at Indy in May in a Buick-powered car. He averaged an awesome 232.482 m.p.h. but, because of a pre-race crash, never even started the 500.

The engines used at Indy, which was the only place where Buicks were truly competitive because of different engine rules for Indy and the rest of the series, took a major investment for only a brief time in the sun each season.

When CART, the Indy-car sanctioning body, refused this year to give the Buick engines more turbocharger boost for the rest of the series, the handwriting was on the wall.

In the Lights program, Buick is a monopoly, supplying all the engines for Indy-car racing’s Triple-A series.

Nobody knows yet who the Driver of the Quarter Century will be because that won’t be announced until Tuesday night at a black tie dinner in Concord, N.C. But the prestigious Chris Economaki Award, named after the still-active pioneer of television racing and the publisher of the weekly National Speed Sport News, will go to Jim Chapman that night.

Chapman is director of racing for PPG Industries, which sponsors the Indy-car series. He also is perhaps the most beloved person involved in Indy-car racing, acting as friend and confidant to nearly everyone he comes in contact with.

The award, established by Ki Cuyler, the Pittsburgh-based businessman who also sponsors the annual Driver of the year Award, was first awarded to Economaki and then went to retiring NASCAR stock Richard Petty. Chapman is the third recipient.

As for the Driver of the Quarter Century (from 1967 through 1991), that will go to one of 10 drivers already selected in a vote by the Driver of the Year panel, which includes 12 nationally known motorsports broadcasters and writers.

The finalists are Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears, Al Unser Sr., Dale Earnhardt, David Pearson, Petty, Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough and Don Garlits.

The winner will be chosen in a vote by the panelists as well as each of the living Driver of the Years winners.